Jews are saved without Jesus, claims a commission report put out by the Vatican. Published December 10, 2015, the report comes on the 50 year anniversary of Vatican II, which repudiated certain antisemitic teachings long-held by the Roman Church. Now, the Vatican claims Christians are not to evangelize Jews and they are saved by what is essentially a corporate election.
The “Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity” created several commissions on what is not Christian unity, per se, but interfaith unity. One such commission was the Commission on the Holy See for Religious Relations with the Jews. They produced the aforementioned report entitled A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of “Nostra Aetate” (No.4). It is that document report that makes the claim that Jews don’t need Jesus.
Under article 35.5, the document says…
35. Since God has never revoked his covenant with his people Israel, there cannot be different paths or approaches to God’s salvation. The theory that there may be two different paths to salvation, the Jewish path without Christ and the path with the Christ, whom Christians believe is Jesus of Nazareth, would in fact endanger the foundations of Christian faith. Confessing the universal and therefore also exclusive mediation of salvation through Jesus Christ belongs to the core of Christian faith.
However, article 35.6 says this…
36. From the Christian confession that there can be only one path to salvation, however, it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God. Such a claim would find no support in the soteriological understanding of Saint Paul, who in the Letter to the Romans not only gives expression to his conviction that there can be no breach in the history of salvation, but that salvation comes from the Jews (cf. also Jn 4:22). God entrusted Israel with a unique mission, and He does not bring his mysterious plan of salvation for all peoples (cf. 1 Tim 2:4) to fulfilment without drawing into it his “first-born son” (Ex 4:22). From this it is self-evident that Paul in the Letter to the Romans definitively negates the question he himself has posed, whether God has repudiated his own people. Just as decisively he asserts: “For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). That the Jews are participants in God’s salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery [emphasis ours].
Then in Article 36.43
43. It is and remains a qualitative definition of the Church of the New Covenant that it consists of Jews and Gentiles, even if the quantitative proportions of Jewish and Gentile Christians may initially give a different impression. Just as after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ there were not two unrelated covenants, so too the people of the covenant of Israel are not disconnected from ‘the people of God drawn from the Gentiles’. Rather, the enduring role of the covenant people of Israel in God’s plan of salvation is to relate dynamically to the ‘people of God of Jews and Gentiles, united in Christ’, he whom the Church confesses as the universal mediator of creation and salvation. In the context of God’s universal will of salvation, all people who have not yet received the gospel are aligned with the people of God of the New Covenant. “In the first place there is the people to whom the covenants and promises were given and from whom Christ was born according to the flesh (cf. Rom 9:4-5). On account of their fathers this people remains most dear to God, for he does not repent of the gifts he makes nor of the calls he issues (cf. Rom 11:28-29)” (“Lumen gentium”, 16).
The Vatican is claiming, essentially, that unbelieving Jews are in God’s covenant, as well as those who’ve yet to receive the Gospel. More than that, the Vatican claims that Jews are a part of the Church, which is why this report is issues under the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. The Vatican is claiming that unbelieving Jews are a part of the Church.
Well…it couldn’t get much stranger. The Roman Church continues to seek a one-world religion…without Jesus.
[Contributed by JD Hall]
